Provider-Independent Online Social Identity Management--Enhancing Privacy Consistently Across Multiple Social Networking Sites

The rising pervasiveness of social networking sites (SNS) poses new privacy risks and prompts adjusting one's online appearance to the current context of usage. This includes the deliberate and targeted disclosure of selected information to a subset of one's contacts, also known as social identity management (SIdM). Yet, when performing SIdM across multiple SNS, it is difficult to maintain a consistent representation of oneself. We introduce a global model to perform SIdM which is independent of particular SNS. Then we show how to apply modifications of the global model to particular sites. We evaluate the feasibility of the approach by surveying currently available settings and APIs in the most important SNS.